In recent years, it has become possible for a portable small terminal (hereinafter referred to as “portable terminal”) such as a mobile phone or PDA (personal digital assistant) to acquire a Web page from the Internet, and for the acquired Web page to be viewed using a browser.
However, a display screen of a portable terminal is smaller and of lower resolution than the display of a stationary terminal such as a personal computer. At the same time, most Web pages are created with viewing on a personal computer in mind. With personal computer displays, a screen size of 10 inches or more and an XGA (extended graphics array) resolution of 1,024 pixels×768 pixels are the mainstream. Therefore, a problem with portable terminals is the difficulty of viewing Web pages.
A portable terminal normally has a small screen of around two to four inches in size. With XGA resolution, images and characters are extremely small and difficult to see. On the other hand, if the resolution is lowered, only a few characters are displayed at a time and the number of line breaks increases, making numerous scrolling operations necessary as well as disrupting the screen layout. Especially when a Web page includes dynamic content so-called multimedia video content, such as photographs, maps, video (moving images), and the like, the video display size is even smaller than the portable terminal screen size, making it difficult to see.
Thus, one idea is to display a Web page acquired by a portable terminal on a separate, comparatively large-size monitor (hereinafter referred to as “external monitor”). An external monitor may be, for example, a television installed in the home, or in a school, office, coffee shop, or the like. In order to display a Web page on an external monitor, a portable terminal must be provided with a function for displaying a Web page on the external monitor display as well as the portable terminal display. A technology for displaying a Web page on a plurality of displays is described in Patent Document 1, for example.
The technology described in Patent Document 1 displays the same screen on a plurality of displays by writing display data stored in a frame buffer to a plurality of VRAMs (video random access memories) provided for each display. Use of this technology makes it possible to display a Web page acquired by a portable terminal on an external monitor as well.
However, a problem with the technology described in Patent Document 1 is that the screen layout is disrupted on an external monitor. This is because the resolution of a portable terminal display is lower than the resolution of a stationary terminal display.
Thus, a technology is described in Patent Document 2 and Non-Patent Document 1 relating to creating individual display data for each display.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram showing a configuration of a display control apparatus when the technology described in Patent Document 2 and Non-Patent Document 1 is applied.
As shown in FIG. 1, display control apparatus 10 has main body video decoder 12 and main body browser 13 corresponding to main body display section 11, and monitor video decoder 14 and monitor browser 15 corresponding to external monitor 20. Main body video decoder 12 and monitor video decoder 14 are implemented as browser plug-ins (see Non-Patent Document 1, for example).
In display control apparatus 10, proxy section 16 that performs data relaying is located between the main body system and monitor system and Web server 30. Display control apparatus 10 also includes input apparatus 17 and browser control section 18. Proxy section 16 holds main body display section 11 and main body video decoder 12 information.
Proxy section 16 acquires Web page data via IP (internet protocol) network 40 from Web server 30, and converts this to content data of the associated area of the respective displays together with individual display information. Then proxy section 16 passes the converted content data to main body browser 13 and monitor browser 15. If video data is included in the content data, proxy section 16 passes the video data to main body browser 13 and monitor browser 15 via main body video decoder 12 and monitor video decoder 14. Main body browser 13 and monitor browser 15 perform associated area display based on the content data passed from proxy section 16.
According to this kind of technology described in Patent Document 2, it is also possible for a Web page screen to be displayed on an external monitor in a suitable layout.    Patent Document 1: National Publication of International Patent Application No. HEI10-504119    Patent Document 2: Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-85057    Non-Patent Document 1: Mozilla Project, “Mozilla Developer Center—Plugins”, [online], [May 26, 2008 search], <URL: http://developer.mozilla.org/ja/docs/Plugins>